


i'm headed straight for the castle

by openended



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Control Ending, Gen, Renegade Commander Shepard, hungry god reapers, reaper queen vanessa shepard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-22
Updated: 2016-09-22
Packaged: 2018-08-16 15:07:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8106949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: She has a title. They should start using it.





	

It’s an easy choice, left to blue. 

The Illusive Man and Anderson are lying dead behind her and she still hears them.

Dimly, like through a very large quantity of water.

(Water. Water would be good.

Her breath is raspy over dry, chapped lips.)

Kill them, but they look enough like cockroaches to come back. One will survive under a rock somewhere out near Heshtok, and half a millennia with the vorcha and the machines rise even stronger and more resilient than before. 

(And possibly with teeth and a penchant for flamethrowers. 

That image makes her laugh, a rough breathy, gravely thing. She’s lost a lot of blood.)

Control them, but controlling a robot army isn’t the galaxy’s strong suit. It looks good for a few years, and then there’s one probably out by Rannoch - because she was an English minor amidst all the physics and engineering and is a sucker for good irony - that decides it has a soul and changes its source coding.

(Two lines, that’s all. Two lines.

Two lines to throw off control collar programs and free will systems.

Hell, she could write two lines of code right now, two lines of code to lock them in place. Even bleeding out and weak and even with her vision darkening with each step, she could write that code. 

Just give her an -)

She trips and slams her knees into the hard metal floor. That fucking kid shimmers over to her, a simulated run that looks like more like a float. She tells him to _fuck the fucking hell off you fucking AI_ and slowly, painfully, stands. Bones crack and wounds reopen and she’s getting blood all over this nice shiny white floor. She intentionally takes a little longer, leaving smeared bloody handprints and smudges of soot stained legs.

(She’s definitely hallucinating the glare he gives to the floor when she finally gets to her feet.

She knows it’s an hallucination.

She doesn’t care. It feels good anyway.

 _Fucking kid_.)

He calls out behind her, tries to bring her back to green and center, but her mind’s made up.

Blue and left. They won’t come back if she’s the one in control, and she’s good at making things _stop_. She’s good at making the universe play by her rules. Her facial scars showed how good she is at it, until they got so angry and so red and so bright that Ashley made a nightlight joke. 

(Ashley.

_Ashley, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything._

_Tali, I’m sorry too. Take care of each other. I love you both._ )

And then she puts them aside, out of mind, and grabs the interface. 

It’s a strange feeling, watching yourself disintegrate as you watch the fleets fly past the open windows. Maybe it’s the blood loss, maybe it’s the delirium, maybe it just doesn’t hurt, but there's no pain, watching specks of herself just _dissolve_. 

It isn’t that she dissolves by layers, skin to muscle to bone, it’s all at once and by the time it reaches her arms and she thinks she should be screaming in horror at this because her hands are just _gone_

(not gone, floating particulate matter in the air above the chamber.

an observation that does not make it better)

she realizes that it does hurt, quite a bit, and has been hurting the whole time, and she definitely should’ve been screaming. But it’s too late now, her body’s disappearing and her mind is warping and twisting, pulling and stretching.

Voices start to appear in her head. Large, old, echo-filled voices, voices in a firefight they’re currently winning - obliterating the enemy. Cold voices, angry voices, and when she experimentally tries and whispers _stop_ , the voices pause for a moment. They pause and contemplate and move on, a nanosecond passes, as if she were a hiccup and nothing more.

She’s gone entirely now but can still see, even without eyes. Her body, full and intact, falls on the floor. Her dog tags fall out of her hand and the kid picks them up. Her body doesn’t move and it’s the strangest thing being able to watch her physical body die. But the voices are louder now, and there are more of them. 

She’s not part of a body anymore. She’s only a mind, and a consciousness, and attached to a lot more individuals than she expected.

The voices are _hungry_ , destroying because they can. She has no body, the keepers have taken it away, but she imagines that she does. Rolls her shoulders back, straightens her spine, lifts her chin. 

“Stop,” she says, louder. “I order you to stop.”

There are murmurs, and only some of them obey. “Harbinger,” she orders into the void.

“Yes,” a voice, much older than the rest, says with a long sigh. The voice comes from somewhere to the left and back, orbiting over Japan. Harbinger certainly wouldn’t miss the assault on Earth.

“Yes _what_?” She demands. Information, details, rules, histories, words upon words of data upon data flood into her hard and fast and she’ll read it all when she has time but right now there’s one thing that sings out louder than the rest. 

Her title.

“My queen,” he says after several moments of hesitation. The two words are begrudging and nearly petulant, but ultimately obedient. He tries to whisper, but a reaper’s whisper is louder than a space fighter on burn off. 

She grins. A slow, dangerous grin that takes its time settling onto her lips that don’t exist. “Yes,” she says. “And I say stop. _Now_.”

The outside chaos immediately halts. No fire, no torpedoes, no lasers. It’s a terrifying sort of stillness, if she still had the ability to feel terror. 

She needs a physical body and so downloads herself into the nearest reaper, finds out the reaper’s name is Overlord. She asks, and Overlord informs her that she’s a medical ship - husks and banshees and marauders and ravagers and cannibals and brutes, even harvesters sometimes. She sounds proud of her work.

She works her way into Overlord’s communication systems.

One to Hackett - _reapers are friendlies, this is my resignation - VS_

One to Tali - _I love both of you. My body may not come back. But I love you. - V_

And then she disconnects. A low rumble, a murmur, starts to roll through the ranks and she doesn’t need to interface with Overlord’s systems to understand that it sounds maybe like reluctance.

But as the rumbling becomes clearer without the outside noise of the Alliance Fleet, now fleeing an energy wave to disparate ends of the galaxy, it isn’t rumbling of dissent. It isn’t murmurs questioning the woman who spent three years trying to kill them suddenly leading them. Even Harbinger finally joins in the low, mechanical susurrus of reapers coming to a conclusion, coming to approval.

She settles against Overlord’s backbone, and Overlord herself doesn’t seem to mind. It’s almost warm, welcoming.

Slowly, the reapers come around, floating in front of her. The ones on the ground tilt upward to where she’s hanging in the night sky, one reaper alone against the rest. Overlord’s blue lights flicker and then come on strong, a bright neon red.

A wave of red flows through the reaper fleet and through the eyes she has on the ground, the reapers below are changing color too. The electronics in the ground troops shift from blue to red.

She smiles, and the whole fleet feels it.

None of them have knees, and she isn’t standing, but it was as much a bow as anything. 

_Queen._

**Author's Note:**

> this is the same Shepard as is in [Repeat the Sounding Joy (the Legends Never Die Remix)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2841932).


End file.
